Snopes is not alone in their leftwing bias. The same bias applies to the “fact-checkers” at Politifact, Facebook, Twitter, Washington Post, and other media-connected checkers and supposed ombudsmen. All are supposedly affiliated with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies’ International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), but they routinely and blatantly violate the number 1 principle of ICFN: a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Not that the Poynter Institute is itself unbiased. To the contrary, this list of donors from 2017 includes George Soros’s TIDES Foundation among other left-wing donors:

Major philanthropies funding Poynter include the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation ($7,535,000 since 2003); Ford Foundation ($2,415,000 since 2000); Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation ($2,190,000 since 2009); Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation Inc. ($300,000 since 2013); Tides Foundation and Tides Center ($275,053 since 2008); Omidyar Network Fund Inc. ($150,000 since 2013); Carnegie Corp. of New York ($150,000 since 2009); and Annie E. Casey Foundation ($140,000 since 2006).

As an aside, Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay, contributed $100,000 to an anti-Trump PAC in 2016. It is no coincidence that his Omidyar Network donations to the Poynter Institute translate directly into support for left-wing anti-Trump fact checkers over the last several years.

Now we can add fact-checkers at the Associated Press to the left-wing list, too. The AP is a major provider of content to small and medium newspapers across the United States. That content has become increasingly left-wing in recent years, and the AP Stylebook – the bible on grammar and style for many print journalists and their editors – was exposed by the NY Post last fall as heavily left-biased:

While it may have started out as an objective source, as with so much of the media it serves, the Stylebook has long since discarded fairness for a liberal bias that betrays the goal of its authors and tilts the playing field against conservatives.

This was on display last month when the Stylebook weighed in to re-educate Americans about the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter protests that resulted in violent riots and looting in hundreds of American cities since the death of George Floyd.

Since speaking the unvarnished truth necessarily paints these events in an unflattering light, the AP advised journalists to stop calling them “riots” and to use the more neutral “protests” instead — even if they were violent. Describing the pillaging of businesses by rioters as “looting” was denounced as racist.

Fast-forward to an AP fact-checker article about 2020 election lawsuits that has been propagated across the country this past week entitled, Skewed data fuel questionable claim on Trump election lawsuits. Given AP’s inherent left-wing bias, one might expect their fact-checker to attempt to undermine stories that show evidence of “anomalies” during the 2020 election. And this is exactly what happened in this piece. Here is the gist of the article:

CLAIM: Former President Donald Trump has won two-thirds of 2020 election lawsuits that have been adjudicated by the courts.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. The claim is based on a tally that does not include several lawsuits filed by Trump or his supporters that were dismissed by the courts or withdrawn by plaintiffs. It also includes many cases filed months before the Nov. 3 election, as well as some cases that do not directly relate to the presidential election. In about 60 lawsuits Trump’s legal team and Republican allies filed since the election, only one resulted in a small victory in Pennsylvania. None of the cases has proven the presence of fraud in the 2020 election.

The rest of the article conflates and twists facts in order to carry water for the Democrat-media narrative that no lawsuits have proven the presence of election fraud in the 2020 election (with the typical implication that the 2020 election was “secure”). The main target of the AP fact-checker was the detailed spreadsheet of 81 presidential election-related lawsuits drawn from a database of over 500 total election-related lawsuits that a team of statistical experts led by physicist and Mensa John Droz, Jr., has compiled. I previously described the content of that spreadsheet in collaboration with Droz here, so I was keenly interested in what the AP fact-checker was talking about. And what I found was deeply troubling and a continuation of media agit-prop about the 2020 election. Here are some points:

First of all, the headline itself is completely misleading, as there was nothing “skewed” whatsoever in the Droz team spreadsheet. Indeed, the AP article completely failed to prove that the data was skewed or that their assessment was correct.

Second, the fact-checker included ad hominem against Droz by imputing that his long-time activism “rejecting the science of climate change” somehow discredits his team’s analysis of 2020 election lawsuits. That’s yellow journalism – and, by the way, there is no proven “science of climate change” in any event. Indeed, the fact-checker’s inclusion of that phrase is additional confirmation of leftwing bias.

Third, the ad hominem attack used the phrase “self-described physicist” as a kind of grammatical pejorative. One would have thought that the fact-checker could have discovered that Droz holds physics degrees from Boston College and Syracuse University.

Fourth, the article concludes that information in the spreadsheet has been “misinterpreted” by readers of at least one blogsite (LifeSiteNews) to conclude that President Trump “could still overturn the election results.” This is a classic strawman argument, as the lawsuit list in the Droz team spreadsheet has nothing to do with that claim.

Fifth, the AP article identified a single database as the source for the Droz team spreadsheet and analysis. This is misleading, as the spreadsheet itself lists eight (8) separate sources for the information compiled.

Sixth, the AP article uses a cited example (Ritchie v. Polis) to “prove” that “some of the cases in the report are also wrongly coded as wins for Trump when they didn’t directly deal with the presidential election.” In fact, Ritchie v. Polis was not just about “petition-signing,” as the AP article states, but rather addressed the much broader situation of whether a governor has the authority to override a state legislature concerning election laws and regulations (the court ruled that the governor does NOT have that authority). Droz has subsequently confirmed that the fact-checker knew the truth about this lawsuit she cited, but chose to ignore it to maintain the false narrative of the article.

Finally, the article includes this statement (to enforce their not-so-hidden agenda): “none of the Trump campaign’s legal efforts convinced a single court to overturn an election outcome.” That is a completely misleading statement, as all of the lawsuits were about election integrity, i.e., that all registered voters who legally vote have their single ballot counted accurately. To conflate the actual purpose of the lawsuits with a quote from a “reputable expert” is yellow journalism.

Conclusion. The Democrat-media complex have been hard at work tamping down any outbreaks of truth about what transpired during the 2020 election. Leftwing fact-checkers are an important part of that full-court press and are purveyors of agit-prop. The AP article that fact-checked the Droz team’s 2020 election lawsuits spreadsheet is misleading at best and willful misdirection at worst. It can be ignored.

The end.